The son of Catholic converts from Judaism chronicles his own return to the Jewish faith after being raised as an altar boy and a devout Christian. Reprint.

Choosing My Religion is a luminous memoir, crafted with the eye of a journalist and the art of a novelist by New York Times Magazine writer and editor Stephen J. Dubner. By turns comic and heartbreaking, it tells the story of a family torn apart by religion, sustained by faith, and reunited by truth.

Reclaim your joy and thrive through the storms of life when you find your strength in God. The human soul has a built-in yearning for joy and beauty and all good things. But that craving for life is so easily lost in the pace and demands of modern life. Join New York Times bestselling author John Eldredge as he gives you the tools you need to follow Jesus' path of supernatural resilience. Between false promises of ease and comfort on one side and the sheer busyness and stress of daily life on the other, people today are facing a shortage of peace, happiness, and strength. In Resilient, Eldredge reveals a path toward genuine recovery and resilience through Jesus himself. Drawing on wisdom from Scripture and Christian tradition, and illustrated throughout with powerful, true stories of grit and survival, Resilient will help you: Tap into the river of life that God promises his people Learn to be patient with yourself--genuine recovery from spiritual and emotional trauma takes time and intentionality Create a plan to foster resilience in your day-to-day life Discover deep wells of freedom and strength through Christ who lives within us Thriving requires a resilient soul. This book will help you find the resilience you long for when the world has gone mad--and discover in Jesus himself the strength that prevails.

As a boy, Stephen J. Dubner's hero was Franco Harris, the famed and mysterious running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers. When Dubner's father died, he became obsessed—he dreamed of his hero every night; he signed his school papers "Franco Dubner." Though they never met, it was Franco Harris who shepherded Dubner through a fatherless boyhood. Years later, Dubner journeys to meet his hero, certain that Harris will embrace him. And he is . . . well, wrong. Told with the grit of a journalist and the grace of a memoirist, Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper is a breathtaking, heartbreaking, and often humorous story of astonishing developments. It is also a sparkling meditation on the nature of hero worship—which, like religion and love, tells us as much about ourselves as about the object of our desire.

A provocative piece of literary work! Provides a vivid exposition of the evil within our midst, the truly dark side of our Saint Lucian culture. Disturbing in its tortuosity, it is not for the faint of heart or those with deep dark secrets. It may be found offensive, inflammatory, and challenging to many of previous eras and also to those in this current era who sing and dance to the words I wanna be a billionaire so freaking bad! . . . Wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine . . . buy the things I never had! A must read, however, for those seekers of wealth, power, and status! The book does a great job of characterizing the escalating problem of depravity of the human soul stemming from social, cultural, and spiritual deficiencies. It begs the question, Has our holy mother, the Catholic church, been able to attain that nexus between Saint Lucias Afrocentric culture and Christianity? Has our local church been able to challenge and confront what has been deemed acceptable to the bourgeoisie as inherent social/cultural/spiritual values reflected in duplicity in religious outlook? The book however provides a ray of hope as it culminates in an expression of the beauty of the sacramental life provided by mother church, which is available to all in order to put on Gods armor so as to be able to resist the devils tactics. It is hoped that there are still many God-fearing persons in our society who continue to strive for the virtues of honesty and integrity, not willing to compromise the well-being of their fellowman for the sake of an insatiable ambition for power, wealth, and fame! This brilliant exposition then ought to move those who possess a genuine soul, a social and moral conscience, those who still bear light in their hearts, to bring light and life into successive generations of our beloved country, Saint Lucia, seeking to reject evil under all conditions.

"The Transatlantic Trade in Africans (TTA) has no equal in the annals of modern history in terms of the scope and depth of suffering experienced by its victims, mostly at the hands of European traders and enslavers. Yet, denial and silence continue to surround this human tragedy. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, two of the Caribbean's most distinguished historians, make extensive use of the research by scholars from Europe, Africa and the Americas to describe the trade and analyse its impact on African, European and Caribbean societies in language and style that makes the information accessible and comprehensible for school students and the general reader. Readers will gain an appreciation of: The role of slavery from ancient to modern times and its development in African societies  The contribution of African scholars and intellectuals in the pre-slavery period and how the trade bled the continent of valuable intellectual and technical resources  The instution of slavery from an economic perspective, through an examination of the business aspects of the development of the TTA  The physical and psychological consequences of the Middle Passage on Africans  The trade in Africans as a business with examples of companies, individuals and nations that were active participants  The contributions of the TTA to the economic development of the West and the underdevelopment of African societies. Trading Souls, like its companion volume Saving Souls, is a reflection upon a history that was terrible and turbulent and tries to make sense of the silence and denial even as it seeks to break it. "

Singer Joley Drake has always known the price she has to pay for her fame and fortune as a popular rock singer, but she's always been careful to stay away from alcohol and drugs, even if others around her haven't. But nothing can prepare her for the suspicion that someone is using her concert afterparties as a way of targeting and kidnapping teen girls and selling them into sexual slavery. Mysterious Russian Ilya Prakenskii seems to have an agenda of his own. The more dealings Joley has with him the more she struggles with the fear that he may be involved in the slavery ring. But Ilya isn't what he seems, and he becomes the only one Joley dares to trust in such treacherous times...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the bestselling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities." "An epic of American city life...a story of such hypnotic specificity that we re-experience all the shades of hope and anger, pity and fear that living anywhere in late 20th-century America has inevitably provoked." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

The ups, downs, and exploits of a group of British Catholics--for whom the sexual revolution came a little later than it did for everybody else... In this bracing satire, a group of university students make their way through the fifties and into the turbulent sixties and seventies. We first meet Dennis, Michael, Ruth, Polly, and the others at the altar rail of Our Lady and St. Jude, but soon enough they get caught up in the alternately hilarious and poignant preoccupations of work, marriage, sex, and babies--not always in that order. A satirical comedy in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, Souls and Bodies take an unblinking look at the sexual revolution and the contemporaneous upheavals in the Catholic Church. The result is as unsettlingly true as it is funny.

The notion that we spring into existence ex nihilo at birth strikes many people as counter-intuitive. By contrast, the idea that we have an eternal identity appeals to some deep intuition about the self. And indeed, belief in the soul's pre-mortal existence has a long history in Western thought. Terryl Givens offers the first systematic exploration of this fascinating if generally unfamiliar feature of Western cultural history.